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Japan’s emergency teams have continued searching through the wreckage of a collapsed shopping mall as the death toll from a powerful earthquake in the country’s southwest climbed to 30, with thousands of survivors struggling through extreme heat without electricity and water.
Officials in Kumamoto said rescue workers recovered four bodies from the remains of the Aeon shopping mall, which was destroyed after a suspected gas explosion struck the facility following Tuesday’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake.
A disaster management official in the region told AFP that rescuers had pulled 10 people from the rubble, including four who were confirmed dead. Another person was found without vital signs, while five others suffered varying degrees of injuries.
The earthquake caused widespread destruction, damaging homes, bridges and infrastructure, while also triggering fires across affected areas. Temperatures are expected to reach 38 degrees Celsius over the weekend, worsening conditions for thousands of displaced residents.
At evacuation centres, many elderly survivors have been forced to sleep on thin mats on hard floors as they seek shelter from the heat. In Uki city, residents gathered in community halls, resting between chairs and tables while watching updates on television.
“Thank God for these shelters,” one woman told AFP, explaining that she had attempted to remain at home or sleep in her car but found conditions unbearable because of the heat and mosquitoes.
Supermarket worker Hiroyuki Matsushima, 53, said the lack of electricity had made life extremely difficult.
“In this heat, if you don’t have electricity and air conditioning, it’s very tough,” he said.
The shopping mall had been evacuated shortly after the earthquake struck, but about 50 minutes later, a massive blast ripped through the building, with an unknown number of employees believed to have still been inside.
Businessman Fumihiko Matsuura, 56, described his narrow escape after visiting the mall just days earlier. “I was here. I was just here,” he told AFP, saying he felt he had narrowly avoided danger.
Rescue footage showed emergency workers navigating twisted metal, hanging cables and broken sections of the ceiling as they searched for survivors.
At a Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro city, five people were also confirmed dead while four others remained missing after part of a smokestack collapsed.
The disaster has disrupted essential services, with more than 22,000 households and facilities still without power and about 84,000 homes facing water shortages.
Japan, one of the world’s most earthquake-prone nations, sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire” and experiences hundreds of tremors each year. The country is still marked by the memory of the 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that killed or left missing about 18,500 people and caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
